Things I learned while canning spaghetti sauce...in no particular order.

• I have amazing neighbors with amazing tomato plants.  Seriously, every year they have a phenomenal crop of tomatoes.  Even when everyone else's tomato plants wither in the heat and die, my neighbors plants double their production. 
• Tomatoes are very messy.
• My kitchen looked like a tomato exploded.  Cabinets, counter tops, the sink, the window.  Everything was covered in tomato juice, tomato seeds, tomato pulp, tomato skin.  It was shocking.
• 6 year olds like to "help" in the kitchen.  But really, it is best to wade through the mess alone.  6 year olds create even more mess and ask a LOT of questions.  "Well...we're doing this because it's fun.  YES!  I know we can just go to the store and buy some spaghetti sauce."
• Skinning a tomato feels a bit like what I imagine skinning an animal must feel like.  I sorta felt like I was killing them.  I apologized, out loud, several times to several tomatoes.
• Lucia Micarelli is quite possibly a musical genius.  Google her. 
• Life seems fairly simply when you're up to your elbows in tomatoes.
• I'm not Italian but I wish I were.  I also wish I had either made the spaghetti sauce after 5pm or on the weekend...I found myself craving a very large glass of red wine. 
• I like food.  I like to cook it.  I like the smell and the taste and the texture.  I like that, when I cook, I think of nothing else except the task very near at hand.  In the entire 2+ hours that it took me to process and can the sauce, I never once thought about the balance of my checking account.
• Lots and lots of tomatoes (read: about 20 pounds)=only 6 jars of spaghetti sauce.
• Dogs won't eat the basil leaves that fall on the floor. 
• If you squeeze a tomato, juice will squirt out and at times, reach an alarming distance.  I'm talking not just inches but feet, people. I think I have tomato juice on my ceiling...
• If you ever start to believe that you are not wonderfully and fearfully made, dissect a tomato.  Tomatoes are fascinating!  I'm thinking if God put that much work into a vegetable, err fruit...whatever...then He certainly cares for and loves me more than I can ever imagine.
• Fresh picked tomatoes taste like a firework in your mouth. There is simply nothing else like it.  They taste of fresh air and sunshine.  They taste like the heat of a summer day and newly cut grass.  More proof that God loves me and wants me to be happy.  Money won't make you happy...but a fresh tomato?  Now that just might do it... 
• When you boil jar lids and then reach into the water with your little magnetic lid grabber...wear a hot pad glove thingy.  Boiling water is hot.  And metal lids are even hotter...more hot?...whatever...
• I now have the up most respect for "Ma" from the Little House on the Prairie.  And I have a new appreciation for store bought canned spaghetti sauce.
• My sauce tastes pretty good...I think. 
• I will enjoy opening up a jar of sauce this winter...When the snow covers the ground and I'm so cold my teeth are cold.
• I thanked the tomatoes.
• My kitchen has never been cleaner.  It took almost as long to clean up as it did to make the sauce.
• All this spaghetti sauce talk is making me want a big plate of spaghetti and a glass of wine.  It also makes me want to live in Italy.

I really have no nice and neat way to wrap this up.  So this is it.  Things I learned while canning spaghetti sauce.